


Demodogs Don't Have Eyes

by AlabasterInk



Category: Stranger Things (TV 2016)
Genre: Angst, Dark, Discussions about murder, Gen, Post-Season/Series 03, Will and El have a lot of problems, Will and El platonic sibling bonding, mentions of dead characters
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-07-21
Updated: 2019-07-21
Packaged: 2020-07-09 17:07:11
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,652
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/19891333
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/AlabasterInk/pseuds/AlabasterInk
Summary: Will and El play a game every night. It’s called: What Was It Today?Today, it’s the bones snapping in the floorboards and death rattling in the walls.





	Demodogs Don't Have Eyes

**Author's Note:**

> So, it came to me today that both Will and El have a bit of a body count piling up. Granted, Will was possessed and El was using self-defense, but that's got to affect them. So I thought it'd be interesting to have them talk it out. It got dark. 
> 
> Anywho, I hope you all enjoy this!

“I killed people.”

“Me too.”

It’s a game they play. It’s not a particularly fun game, but they play it all the same. The walls of their new apartment are old and gurgle in ways that sound all too close to a death rattle, and the children that live there can no more sleep than they can pretend they don’t hear it. Like most of the games that involve Before, this one begins at night, during that long quiet period fit only for equally quiet conversations.

The day, they find, is too bright; the glistening light makes it apparent just how much they don’t belong together. They’re too similar, like two identical pieces of the same puzzle that got mixed into one box. There’s a nagging feeling that they were never supposed to meet; that occupying the same space has broken some sort of universal law they were never meant to know about.

Will and El.

“Do you know how many?”

El and Will.

“Yeah.”

They stick to the night. They stick to whispered conversations the day would only make real. Whatever the night hears, it keeps, and Will and El have too much between them to air it all to the world. So they play the game. It starts like Twenty Questions and ends in commiseration so depressing the only thing they’re missing is alcohol.

El likes stuffed animals. It’s the only thing she had in the lab. Will gives her his bear.

Will hates the cold. It reminds him of _There_ and _Him_. El gives him her blanket.

They both prefer dogs to cats, but have still adopted their neighbor’s clowder because their neighbor is mean and doesn’t deserve them.

Sometimes El can’t look at them. Sometimes Will can’t touch them.

“Do you?”

“No.”

They still don’t fit. Or perhaps they fit too well. Shadows wrap around the knots that tie them together, and they both hate it and find they couldn’t live otherwise. It’s harder to drown when you have someone else treading the same pool.

But the pool is deep and dark, and nightmares have them sharing a room even before they move. Mostly, they sit in silence. Other times, they play.

_What was it today?_

Today, it’s the bones snapping in the floorboards and death rattling in the walls.

“What did it feel like?”

“Nothing.”

Their room is small. Jonathan sleeps on the pull-out-couch in the living room, and Joyce is across the hall. They didn’t plan it like this, but the Byers aren’t much for plans anyway and Jonathan will be leaving in less than a year. It’s easier than having to deal with the nightmares alone.

“Oh.”

“You?”

A siren wails in the distance. The city is as different from Hawkins as it’s possible to get, and there’s a comfort in that difference that’s as welcome as it is painful. Almost everything about Hawkins is painful.

“Sticky. And hot.”

“Hot?”

It’s snowing outside. Christmas was weeks ago, but the lights are still up, brightening the alleyways with red and green and white and blue. Neither one of them is particularly thrilled by the weather, but the hot chocolate they made to warm themselves has gone cold at their feet. They sit facing each other, their backs to their beds and their chins resting on their knees. If they didn’t know any better, they’d think they were looking into a mirror.

“Blood is hot.”

“Oh. Right.”

It isn’t a conversation they ever wanted to have. It isn’t one they ever thought they would. But if there’s anything they’ve learned over the past few months of living together it’s that expectations count for nothing and monsters have to stick together.

Monsters and murderers and everything in between. 

“It was sweet, too.” Will’s face twists, as if he’s both disgusted and wistful and guilty all at the same time. He picks at the mug of hot chocolate, but doesn’t go to drink it.

El’s brow furrows. “Sweet?” In her experience, blood only ever tastes like the pennies hidden under Dustin’s couch. 

“Yeah. I liked it.”

Rather, the demodogs liked it, but there was so little separation between him and them that it doesn’t matter. El nods anyway. She understands; she knows he’s not just talking about the taste.

“I liked it, too,” El admits, two-parts ashamed, one-part defiant. She takes a deep breath. “It felt…good.”

Will nods. “You felt powerful. Like you had control.” And it’s not the same. Will never had control. Not with the Mind Flayer. It wasn’t his choice.

But it was. He remembers burning. He remembers anger. His own anger. The Mind Flayer may have forced his hand, but Will didn’t fight. Not like he could have. He wanted those soldiers to hurt. He wanted the lab to go away. He didn’t want them to die, but there’s still a part of him that doesn’t regret it. Not completely. Not like he should.

El worries her lip, tracing the rim of her mug with a delicate finger. “Yeah.” She presses her legs closer to her chest and ignores the way it makes the floorboards snap. “They hurt you, and…you hurt them back. It feels good. Bad, but good.”

“It feels safe,” Will agrees. “Like you have something now that they can’t take. For once, they’re afraid of you.”

“You like fear. It,” the floorboard snaps again and they flinch, “helps.”

“Yeah. It helps.” Silence settles over the room, and they can hear a fight brewing from the street. People are always fighting in the city; they’ve gotten used to tuning them out.

Will picks at a hole in the wood. There are plenty of holes, and Will and El have discovered enough loose floorboards to hide every secret they’ve ever shared.

They have plans to add a rug, something fuzzy and warm and purple, but Will is aware enough to know it won’t be happening anytime soon. The move took a lot out of their finances and now that they have another person it’s just one more pressure they can’t afford.

Maybe he should get a job. Fourteen isn’t that young. Jonathan started working at sixteen and there are plenty of opportunities in the city.

“Are we bad?” El whispers into the stillness. She’s completely hunched in on herself and won’t look him in the eye. Brilliant lights flash through their window from the cars passing below forming bands across their faces that highlight the shadows under their eyes.

Will shrugs half-heartedly. “I don’t know.” They have to be bad, right? Only bad people would do what they did.

“I don’t like fear, but I do,” El mutters. “It’s…confusing.”

 _Confusing?_ That’s one word for it. “You want to feel more guilty than you do,” Will says, trying to work out his own feelings on the matter. The plumbing in the wall burbles and it sounds like a demodog digging into a meal. “And you can’t because…”

“Because it’s not real,” El finishes for him, brown eyes quivering and distant. “They’re not real.”

Will bites his lip. “But they were real.” Even though it doesn’t feel like it. Even though he only has a handful of names for 237 murders. “They had lives. And jobs. And homes.”

“And faces.” El’s eyes are wide and Will flinches.

“Yeah,” he breathes, “and faces.” There’s another siren, more shouting from the street, and upstairs a night owl flushes the toilet. The walls thrum and Will swallows harshly. “Do you…do you see their faces?”

El shrugs weakly, blurs of identical people flickering through her memory. “Sometimes. Not everyone, but there is…a woman. And a cat. And Papa’s friends. But,” she takes a deep breath and looks at him frantically. Her voice breaks. “I didn’t know they wouldn’t get up. Not…not at first.”

“And by time you did, it didn’t matter.”

“No.”

“They were hurting you, and you wanted them to stop.”

“Yes.”

Kill enough people and eventually you stop noticing.

Will nods. “I understand.” It’s self-defense he tells himself. And it’s true. El never killed a person who wasn’t trying to hurt her first. But they can rationalize it until the cows come home and it won’t change a thing.

“Do you see them?” El questions. “The faces?”

“No.” _One._ But he isn’t sure Bob counts because the last he saw of Bob was him jumping into a hole in the ground, and everything after that is just screaming and screaming and _screaming_. It’s both better and worse and Will smirks sardonically. “Demodogs don’t have eyes.”

“Oh.”

“Yep.” The _p_ pops between his lips and he nudges his stone cold mug with his toe. Across the room, El mirrors him. “I hear them, though. And taste them.”

“Hot and sweet.”

“Mm. And the sound…” he wrinkles his nose as it echoes through his memory. The floorboards shift. “It…squelched. And snapped.”

“The bones,” she whispers, horror and understanding on her face. “They snap. Like gum.”

Will nods. “They scream, too. Not for long, but enough.”

“Mine don’t,” El says. “They just…snap.”

“They snap, and they fall. And then they don’t get up.”

“No,” she agrees. “They don’t get up. And it doesn’t matter.”

“They’re dead anyway,” he murmurs. “And you don’t know why you were counting.”

“They all look the same.”

“And sound the same.”

“And you don’t feel it.”

“Or taste it.”

El looks at her brother, imploring and dark and bottomless. “Are we monsters, Will?”

“I don’t know,” he answers, equally desperate, equally shadowed, and equally bottomless. “No. Yes. I think so.”

“I think so, too.”

Will huffs without humor and raises his mug. “To monsters, then.”

“To monsters,” she smiles. It’s crooked and dead and shows no teeth. Christmas lights bleed their faces red.

The game is over. They’ll play again tomorrow. They knock back their cocoa and settle in to a night of snapping floorboards and rattling pipes.

**Author's Note:**

> Thank you so much for reading and please leave a review. I experimented a bit with my writing style so let me know how it worked. Thank you so much again!


End file.
